Politico’s Dylan Beyers laments the pathetic mess that was cable news coverage of last night’s Wisconsin Recall:
If ever there was a political event to lay bare the partisan ideologies of the cable news media, the Wisconsin recall was it.
MSNBC was blatantly rooting for Tom Barrett to defeat Gov. Scott Walker, even sending union champion Ed Schultz to cover an event with no apologies for the dog he has in the fight. (Earlier tonight, Chris Matthews even told Schultz that if he wasn’t an MSNBC host, he could be head of the AFL-CIO.) When it became clear that Barrett would lose, Schultz looked almost teary eyed. Not long after, the network’s contributors immediately began suggesting that this was, in fact, good news for Obama — who, after all, hadn’t even set foot in Wisconsin — and began attacking Mitt Romney.
Meanwhile,Fox News was blatantly rooting for Gov. Walker, and the moment it became clear that Walker might win, host Sean Hannity called it “a repudiation of big unions,” which did “everything they could do to demonize Scott Walker.” Guest Hugh Hewitt then predicted that, five months from now, Romney would follow Walker just “as Reagan followed Thatcher.” Fox’s Greta Van Susteren later hosted what amounted to a victory celebration for the Republicans.
Given this blatant partisan coverage, it was absolutely impossible to watch either network and weed out any clear understanding of the actual significance of the event, much less what effect it would actually have on the 2012 presidential election.
It would have been a perfect night for CNN to step in and provide some relatively unbiased, insightful, political commentary. Sadly, as this video shows, the world’s first all-news network spent most of the first hour after Wisconsin polls closed re-broadcasting footage from Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubliee:
CNN was actually the only network that devoted much time to the Jubilee to begin with, most likely because they happen to employ former Daily Mirror editor and British media personality Piers Morgan, so I suppose they had to air some footage last night to justify however much money they spent covering something that, in all honesty, isn’t really of interest to Americans. Nonetheless, it was disappointing that the night started out with Wolf Blitzer telling us that exit polls showed that the race between Walker and Barrett was “very close,” only to see him come back within the hour projecting a Walker win. What the heck happened in between? If nothing else, the initial exit poll data was being woefully misinterpreted. On some level, I suppose I can’t blame CNN, though. It takes awhile for raw results to start coming in even in this technological day and age, and I’m not sure that an hour of listening to Anderson Cooper, Erick Erickson, and Paul Begala talk about the impact of an election before they even know what the results are might actually have been more boring than watching the richest woman in the world take part in a taxpayer-subsidized party. Still, perhaps they could have done what C-SPAN did and simulcast with one of the local television stations in Madison or Milwaukee. At least they would’ve had reporters on the ground.
But no, instead we got Piers Morgan gushing over some old lady on a balcony.
Of course, if CNN was disappointing, MSNBC and Fox were just pathetic in their partisanship. Night’s like last night are the reason I can barely watch either network for more than a few minutes anymore . Sadly, that kind of nonsense is what brings in viewers, and it shows in the fact that CNN continues to suffer from some of its worst ratings in years. If this is any indication of what Election coverage between now and November is going to be like, it’s going to get pretty painful.
